The Young Girls of Rochefort

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Unfinished Song

In Unfinished Song, Vanessa
Redgrave proves impressive as an indomitable woman who refuses to allow
terminal cancer to keep her from participating in the amateur choir that meets
in the community center of the small British town where she and her husband
reside. A more mannered Terence Stamp keeps pace as her grump of a
husband, a retiree who desperately tries to shelter his ailing wife. Stamp’s
Arthur is afraid that Redgrave’s Marion will hasten her demise by attending too
many choir practices. Of course, he’s even more afraid of losing her.

Can too much singing be bad for you?

Movie facts

Running time

93 minutes

MPAA rating

PG-13 for some sexual references and rude gestures

Year released

2013

Robert Denerstein

For 27 years, Robert Denerstein was the film critic at The Rocky Mountain News. Read more of Robert's reviews at Denerstein Unleashed.

Writer/director Paul Andrew Williams can’t entirely avoid
sentimentality, and the movie’s choir sounds anything but amateurish as it
works on unlikely tunes such as Salt-N-Pepa’s Let’s Talk About Sex. I
suppose we’re meant to find humor in the fact that aging singers would tackle
such youth-oriented material, but it’s an awfully cheap joke.

Gemma
Arterton, also on view this week in Neil Jordan’s Byzantium, plays
the militantly cheerful music teacher who leads the choir and who eventually
persuades Stamp’s grieving character to participate. In a scene that doesn’t
quite mesh with the rest of the movie, the screenplay suggests that Aterton’s
character may be hanging around with older people as a form of emotional
protection from serious involvement with people her own age. An underdeveloped
subplot puts Arthur into conflict with his son James (Christopher
Eccleston).

Some audiences will find Williams’s movie moving (Stamp’s solo
rendition of Billy Joel’s Lullaby is meant to be a tear-jerker), but too
much about Unfinished Song seems pre-packaged for seniors, and too
little of it feels as if it involves any sort of genuine discovery.